We have limited cognition and limited emotional investment, much of which has already just been spent on creating what is hopefully a high-quality post. ONE person doing it through status-seeking creates like 10 copy-cats, of which eight probably ARE doing it genuinely.

But giving them all the benefit of the doubt lets the status-seeking saboteur hide among the rest, and separating them all out takes effort that wears down the author.

1. It’s not a change in topic. It’s an explicit focus on the topic-in-question, and an attempt to explain—in a way that people’s guts will *get* - WHY the current equilibrium is preferred to the one being proposed by the author.

2. At no point does it even connotationally say “yay abuse”. It DOES connotationally call out humans-as-a-process for consistently performing actions that signal “yay abuse”, however. Connotationally saying “yay abuse” would have been phrased very differently, and I think we all know that.

3. Controversiality has less to do with opt-in/​opt-out, and more to do with… who we think the connotations are making look bad. I’d really like that to stop.

I understand the impulse to go “really, you can’t be serious”, especially given the tendency of LWers to nitpick, but I think one should be cautious about invoking it as long as there are charitable alternative interpretations.

That’s not sustainable. There really are a certain subset of articles that have been suffering ‘death by papercuts’. Yes, they get upvotes; yes, they get good comments—but the entire tone of their debates has been pretty thoroughly shredded by whataboutisms.

That actually *needs* a strong pushback. It creates a kind of emotional fatigue on the authors that legitimately drags down the quality of future articles.

Likewise, just because an accusation of abuse is true, doesn’t mean we will gain anything by believing it /​ defending it. Sometimes it’s actually to our advantage to let someone be abused, if the abuser can more consistently reward us than the abused.

I mean that when I try to present the idea that you should do this for everyone, I get a LOT of pushback. I put in “you shouldn’t do this for everyone” specifically so people wouldn’t think that anyone should do it for ME, and therefore fight me on the premise.